Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh!

Beginning today you can download the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh (WPDT CTP) from http://developer.windowsphone.com, which means you can now build Windows Phone 7 apps on the final release of Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010). While this update is primarily intended to enable development using the final release of VS2010 there are a few new things here too.

A few APIs in the frameworks have been added and or changed. See this MSDN page for more details.

The documentation has been updated with new and expanded topics. See this MSDN page for more details.

We’ve provided limited support for launchers and choosers. In cases where the underlying built-in experience is not present launchers and choosers are still not available (i.e. the email chooser asks you to select a contact, but there are no contacts in the emulator and no way to add one).

Pause/Resume events are now supported.

If the tools are installed as the admin user, non-admin users are now able to deploy to the emulator.

A problem with incremental deployment of projects has been fixed.

A problem resulting in the error “Connection failed because of invalid command-line arguments” being displayed during project creation has been fixed.

A problem where the Windows Phone node was not appearing in VS 2010 on non-system drives has been fixed.

Design time skin refresh issues have been addressed.

Please read the release notes before installing this refresh. A few tips:

Uninstall the previous CTP first (the item in Add/Remove programs to uninstall is “Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP-ENU”)

If you have the RC of VS2010 installed, uninstall it first and then install the final release.

You can install Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP even if you do not have Visual Studio already installed.

We’ve introduced a few ‘breaking changes’ with this release. The one that will impact almost everyone who used the existing release is a requirement that all WMAppManifest.xml files have a filled out <CAPABILITIES> section. The release notes describe this in more detail and the tools will warn you when you open an existing project.

As noted above this refresh is intended primarily to ensure compatibility with the RTM version of Visual Studio 2010. We are working additional releases that we will make available through the launch of Windows Phone 7 in the fall. So please keep sending us your feedback, as we take it all to heart and want to get you what you need in the final product which we can only do with your continued partnership. We can’t wait to see the apps you’re building!

Update [4/29 1:30PM PST]: We’ve identified an issue in this release with regard to the loading of signed precompiled assemblies in the context of your application. If, when you try to run your application in the emulator you get a ‘System.IO.FileLoadException’ error, please see Brandon Watson’s blog for a workaround.